Strange Adventures #121

Few things capture the spirit of late-1950s/early-1960s science-fiction comics quite like a pterodactyl swooping over the U.S. Capitol building. Murphy Anderson's cover for this 1960 DC gem depicts a massive flying reptile soaring in the foreground, with more of its prehistoric kin visible through a shimmering time-gap that reveals a lost Mesozoic world of dinosaurs and ancient landscapes behind them. The cover's tagline — "Through a gap in time comes a menace from one hundred million years ago" — sets up writer Gardner Fox's tale of ancient terror descending on the modern world, and for a dime, that's a genuinely irresistible premise.